Victoria wants to Baptize.
I understand. It’s for her mom.
Normally I would say, “Fuck the family, do what you feel.” But in this case, I understand, which makes me feel very understanding.
It’s like this: Victoria already feels like the freak of her family. She’s the LESBIAN. She’s also the only one who moved to America. The rest of her big, close family lives in Venezuela.
So now that she’s pregnant, she wants to do it right in their eyes. And she wants her son to belong.
Okay. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I’m having a sort of bipolar reaction. On the one hand, I don’t believe in it, of course, because I’m a Jew, so I’m thinking what’s the big deal? I’m even thinking Tashi and I will get sprinkled too. Why not? A little water on the forehead never drowned anyone. And I don’t want half my family to be baptized and the other half to be floating around somewhere, unprotected.
On the other hand, the water really scares me. The father, son and holy ghost scare me too. That shit’s scary. I don’t believe in them, of course, I’m a Jew (I already said that), but just in case there’s some power there, I’m freaked out.
I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and I thought, this is my chance to talk to a like-minded priest. I made an appointment with Father Steven, a priest in the Castro, and as soon as we said hello, he said, “So you’re thinking about becoming Catholic?”
I said, “Oh, no, no.” And I explained that I was thinking about becoming baptized because I didn’t want half my family baptized and the other half not baptized and that I wanted to understand what the whole thing was about before I by accident went Catholic.
He was very nice. I don’t know if he’d ever had a lesbian Jew come in for a baptism, but he didn’t act weird at all. He just said that no priest would perform the ritual unless I was going to commit to Catholicism. He said the ceremony wasn’t magic.
I was bummed, because that’s how I was sort of thinking about it. I thought that if there was some magical protection to be had, it didn’t really matter to me who’s God was providing it, my daughter and I could use it, why not?
Father Steven did say that someone else could perform the ritual and that it would still be valid. So in the end, I left feeling pretty hopeful, like we can create our own version of baptism if we want to, and if you think about it, how different is baptism from a mikvah? I wish though that I had asked what he meant by valid because now I don’t know if La Suegra (that’s mother-in-law in Spanish) will go for it if someone not wearing the black robe and collar drips the water.
